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Little Infinite Poem

by Federico Garcia Lorca

For Luis Cardoza y Aragon

To take the wrong road
is to arrive at the snow,
and to arrive at the snow
is to get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the
grasses of the cemeteries.

To take the wrong road
is to arrive at woman,
woman who isn’t afraid of light,
woman who murders two roosters in one second,
light which isn’t afraid of roosters,
and roosters who don’t know how to sing on top of the
snow.

But if the snow truly takes the wrong road,
then it might meet the southern wind,
and since the air cares nothing for groans,
we will have to get down on all fours again and eat the
grasses of the cemeteries.

I saw two mournful wheatheads made of wax
burying a countryside of volcanoes;
and I saw two insane little boys who wept as they leaned on
a murderer’s eyeballs.

But two has never been a number -
because it’s only an anguish and its shadow,
it’s only a guitar where love feels how hopeless it is,
it’s the proof of someone else’s infinity,
and the walls around a dead man,
and the scourging of a new resurrection that will never end.
Dead people hate the number two,
but the number two makes women drop off to sleep,
and since women are afraid of light,
light shudders when it has to face the roosters,
and since all roosters know is how to fly over the snow
we will have to get down on all fours and eat the grasses of
the cemeteries forever.

While Little Infinite Poem seems to be part of Lorca’s more
experimental work, it also seems to carry a signature typical
for most of his work, the idea that became the cornerstone
of his philosophy on art and his view of the Spanish tradition:
‘Duende’. According to The Cortland Review, Little Infinite Poem is
drenched in Duende, which Lorca defines by borrowing Goethe’s
allusion to the ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and
no philosopher explains’. The Duende for Lorca is a force that
is irrational and intuitive; spiritually connected to the earth
and pantheistic; and – quintessentially Spanish – aware of death.
‘All that has black sounds has Duende,’ wrote Andalusian cantaor
Manuel Torre, and Lorca seems to agree. And for him the Duende’s
obsessions with death and so forth bring forth the artist’s
creativity, make it a unique force animating the latter. So indeed:
Little Infinite Poem is drenched in Duende.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

[Via Community Development Resource Association]

Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.

Ben Okri

Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of a culture. Therefore, if an individual can express what is undeniably real to him without invoking any authority beyond his own experience, he is transcending the belief systems of his culture.

Robert Combs